When Hurricane Michael hit on Oct. 10, 2018, I never expected it to clobber Gadsden County the way it did. It’s not even coastal. I remember thinking that since it was on a track to come toward Tallahassee early on, it would definitely wobble one way or another before it made landfall, and likely slow down before it did.

My assessment of the situation plus the teenager’s need to be in Jacksonville a couple of days later for major back surgery had me convinced my best plan for this particular storm was to just weather it out – unlike Irma in 2017, where I convinced my parents to evacuate with me ahead of the storm to a spot out of its path about 7 hours away in Mississippi. With all the cats and dogs and humans, we were quite the caravan.

Irma didn’t do much in my neck of the woods; however, it did put a big tree crashing through my parents’ storage building, so we had the right idea.

But it took a phone call from a family member in the Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to convince me that we had to do more than board up and hunker down for Hurricane Michael.

That’s how I found myself in a mad dash to gather up a few extra items for our hurricane kit plus a few pillows and sleeping bags to wait out the storm at Gadsden County High School, which had opened as a storm shelter.

I told myself to think of it as spending a night in an airport because of a canceled flight. Very annoying and uncomfortable – but in the end, no big deal.

Well the first surprise came when we arrived in the early afternoon, because that’s about when the winds started really whipping up, much earlier than when I thought they would, based on forecasts. We were almost blown into the shelter. There were no more cots available so we had a taped-off area on the gym floor and a couple of hard plastic chairs. Good times.

Did I mention it was my birthday?

At first I was on the phone and then texting my parents, who stubbornly refused to come to the shelter. Then I lost cell service, and at a certain point I couldn’t text, either. Then the sounds started. When the hurricane-force winds hit, it sounded as if there were monsters trying to get in through the metal roof. I remember looking around me for the closest doorway in case the ceiling started to come off – or fall in. But the building remained intact. We did, however, lose power, and with it, the air conditioning. Generators powered a fan and some lights.

Wonderful Red Cross volunteers handed out our first shelter meal – a wrap and an apple and some graham crackers, a nice supplement to our hurricane kit snacks.

In the morning, I was not happy to learn we were not allowed to leave even though the storm had passed and the sun was out. Something about trees and power lines down everywhere making it unsafe to travel. I suddenly saw the fence surrounding the high school in a much more dystopian sci-fi light.

I think they started allowing us to leave around 11 a.m., at our own risk. We checked on my parents, who were fine and had no damage because all the trees blew down away from the house. But on the way, there were plenty of trees and power lines down, making for slow going. Over on State Road 267/Pat Thomas Parkway by Walmart there was a concrete power pole broken in half like a twig. A line of wooden utility poles on Joe Adams Road had been snapped like so many matchsticks. The scene in front of my house took my breath away. A neighbor’s tree was in front of and on my house. It actually looked worse than it was, with only a limb or two that had poked through the roof into the spare room and done other comparatively minor damage, such as tearing off the gutters on that side and knocking the deck railing loose.

It took a couple of weeks for power to be restored, longer for my parents who were out in the country. They came into town for cold showers until they got a generator to run the well pump.

There was damage at the office, too, though the full extent wasn’t revealed until a Nov. 1 downpour brought water pouring in through the ceiling by the front door. Sometimes there just aren’t enough extra buckets, wastebaskets and tarps.

But a few days after the storm hit, I was in Jacksonville with the teenager, and we enjoyed sucking up hotel air conditioner and wifi the night before her surgery. This also allowed me to start working on the paper remotely, because it took a while for normal Internet and cable to come back online at the office and my house.

I still wonder why I had to end up in a hurricane shelter on my birthday, but I am grateful my family and co-workers were all safe and, ultimately, just fine.

I share this story because inside this edition is the hurricane guide from The Wakulla News. It has a lot of great info on being prepared for a hurricane and the aftermath. I encourage everyone who can to start assembling your hurricane kit and disaster plan now or updating your old one. Inside the new hurricane guide there is a handy checklist for supplies.

I would also encourage packing extra nonperishable snacks that you like, plus plenty more if you have kids. In a crisis I have a fondness for peanut butter, those buttery round crackers, and, if you can find it, maybe a can or two of bacon-flavored “squeezey” cheese.

But if circumstances permit, pay attention to the general path of the storm, board up, take the kit with you and get the heck out of Dodge to wherever the storm is least likely to be. Remember to leave soon because you might find yourself sharing the road with our friends from South Florida if they’re fleeing the path of the same storm. Along the way, keep monitoring the forecast in case the storm changes.

For example, Michael was still a Category 1 hurricane when it hit Macon, Ga., cutting a broad swath of destruction along the way. So if I had evacuated in that direction or toward Fayetteville, N.C., as some in the family recommended, we might have had trouble getting home without some major detours. At the other end of the spectrum, Irma didn’t do much in Gadsden County, and we headed home earlier than we planned.

Storms don’t do what they’re supposed to. Remember that Michael was classified as a Category 4 storm when it made landfall; however, some time in 2019 that information was revised by NOAA, because it had actually done the unexpected and sped up, making landfall as a Category 5 with estimated sustained winds at 160 mph.

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